


When I Am This

by YumeArashi



Category: The Last Unicorn - Peter S. Beagle
Genre: AU, Dark, Gen, what if
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-27
Updated: 2013-08-27
Packaged: 2017-12-24 19:45:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/943933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YumeArashi/pseuds/YumeArashi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Schmendrick shows Molly how things could have been, had she never joined them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When I Am This

"Do you ever wonder?" Molly asked abruptly around the campfire one evening, scattering a silence as lazy and contented as the cat that napped on her lap.  "What might have happened if things had been different?"

"Different how?" Schmendrick asked with a secretly fond smile.

"Any way.  It just seems as though everything had to have happened just as it did.  Anything else, and…and we would have failed.  She would have."  Molly spoke the pronoun with wistful reverence, as if half hopeful and half afraid that it could conjure the creature to which it referred.  "If the butterfly hadn't brought her news, if the carnival hadn't brought you to her, if Lir hadn't given her a reason to fight, then the others would still be in the sea."  _And perhaps she with them_ , she thought but did not say.  Living with a wizard, you learned that words held power.

"Ah, but you left yourself out," said wizard chuckled, warm and soft.  "If the butterfly and the carnival and Lir were all fated meetings, then surely our run-in with Captain Cully's merry band was no less meant to be."

"Oh, get on with you, you great lump," Molly shoved him affectionately.  "I was glad to be whatever service I could, but Molly Grue never changed anyone's fate, much less the fate of all the unicorns in the world."

"Are you so sure?" Schmendrick's smile ached sadly.  "If you cannot see yourself the difference you made, perhaps I should show you.  Would you like to see, then, what would have happened without you?"

The worn, sharp face lit with curiosity, the tawny eyes bright.  She only barely stopped herself from asking 'you can do that now?' – a question which had passed her lips far too often already.  "Who could resist an offer like that?"

"Who indeed?" Schmendrick murmured as his long, scarred hands began to weave images into the warm, breathless air of the summer night. 

 

* * *

 

Schmendrick's time in Cully's camp was little different, but as he trudged away from the lovelorn oak, this time he and the unicorn walked away uninterrupted.  The ageless wizard seemed more tired, more dispirited without the indignation of his argument with Molly, and he did indeed head off in the wrong direction.

Of course they found their way again, after reaching the next town and asking, but things were different.  The two walked in silence, the unicorn walking ahead unspoken to and untouched, the inept magician stumbling along in her orbit.

They made their weary way to Hagsgate and through it, to the inevitability of the Bull.  Schmendrick staggered frantically after the racing myths, pleading aloud for the magic to come to him.  But Molly was not there, with her fierce insistence that he had the power to intervene.  Without her to convince him he could cast it, without her to beg him to do so, the magic he needed did not come to him.

He trailed urgently after the pair to the haphazard castle, sick to his soul as he helplessly watched the Red Bull drive the very last unicorn in the world into the sea.  He stalked the Bull to its lair with some half-formed idea of attacking it, but found it had vanished with the dawn.

Grief and desperation drove him to the castle gates, and he talked his way into Haggard's service, as he had done with Molly and Amalthea.  As before he performed all the cheap tricks and sleight of hand for Haggard as he searched for any way to free the unicorn, and as before he hated every moment of it.  But without the reprieve of Molly's caustic and homey companionship, despair soon dogged him like a living thing, darting in with sharp little bites that slowly turned to the constant clamp of crushing jaws.

Lir seemed scarcely to notice the newest resident of the castle, occupied as he was with his upcoming marriage.  He didn't seem to care much about it, however, an indifference which apparently extended to all aspects of his life.  It stood as armor against the withering scorn of his son that Haggard made silently clear at every turn, though it served inadequately.

The little autumn cat haunted the kitchen but Schmendrick was far too focused on his mission to pay it any mind.  Eventually it crossed Haggard's path as they both prowled the halls, and he told the men-at-arms to kill it.  The eldest had mercy and took it far from the castle instead, but its secrets went with it. 

The wizard never found the way to the Bull, neither coaxed speech from the skull nor looked twice at the clock.  Not that it would have availed him if he had, since he could conceive of no way to fight the Bull, to trick it, or to otherwise release its captive.

In time he convinced himself that the unicorn must have drowned.  He refused to see the others on the rising tide, until he no longer could - until the waves were nothing more than sea and spray in his eyes.  He told himself that there never were any such things as unicorns, until he believed it.  And eventually he told himself that magic wasn't real either, over and over as if the lie could fill the howling emptiness in his heart.  He believed that, too, in the end, but never a moment's comfort did he have of it.

Lir married his princess but rather unsurprisingly, things soured quickly.  The prospect of being a queen someday soon lost its appeal in the face of meager meals, bare stone rooms, and the living blight that was her father-in-law.  In the end she fled back to her family, leaving Lir with one more failure for his father to scorn, and with indifference souring to bitterness.

Haggard watched the death of the dreams around him with grim approval.  It seemed to be the only thing he took any pleasure from, save the unicorns.  He lived to a very old age, never changing much, until death took him suddenly in his sleep.  By that time Lir was as old and hard and  jaded as Haggard had been when the last unicorn was lost.  He never knew that the unicorns were beneath his very windows, and though the Bull vanished when Haggard died, they never dared to leave the sea.

 

* * *

 

Molly shivered as the images faded away, huddling from the bleak tale in the bony shelter of Schmendrick's shadow.  "Is that really what would have happened?" she whispered, horrified.

"It is one possibility.  There are a few others, all equally grim if not more so," the wizard told her, handing her a comforting bowl of her own soup.  "But because of you, none of them came to pass.  You may not have been a princess or a magician or a hero, but you were something better.  You were our practicality and our determination, our kindness and our comfort.  You were our strength – no, more than that, Molly, you were our heart.  We couldn't have done it, none of us, without you."

To her surprise, Molly Grue found that her world-weary cheeks could still conjure a blush.


End file.
